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2010 National Book Award Finalist,
Poetry

Monica Youn

Ignatz

Jean Hartig: What was your response to Ignatz
being named a finalist for the National Book Award?

Monica
Youn:I had just gotten off the plane from France
and was frantically checking my e-mail in the passport
line—which you’re not supposed to do—because
we were in the middle of an emergency appeal to the
Supreme Court. (I’m an election lawyer, and right
now is our crazy season.) While I had been in the air,
my work e-mail had racked up dozens of messages about
the case, but there was one from an old acquaintance
saying “congrats on the NBA!” While I was
puzzling through this (National Basketball Association?),
my cell phone ran out of batteries. By the time I checked
it again, standing next to a power outlet in the baggage
claim, I was able to check my personal e-mail, to find
hundreds of congratulatory notes. I wish I could say
I did a little dance or something else endearing, but
I think I was too jet-lagged—I just stared. But
I should note that I was especially pleased to hear
that one of my former poetry professors, Jim Richardson,
is one of my co-nominees.

JH: The figure of Ignatz has echoes of politician,
of cowboy, of patriarch, of criminal (to name a few
of the archetypes I sensed). Were there any cultural
figures that inspired different incarnations or visions
of your subject?

MY:
The book
is structured as four landscapes—desert, freeway,
ghost town, and forest—and each of these landscapes
has an associated aspect of Ignatz—the beloved,
the hero, the villain, and the fugitive. I borrowed
quite broadly from various cultural traditions in order
to add resonances, either sonic or narrative. Thus,
“Afterwards Ignatz” echoes the language
of Beowulf; “So Sweetly Slumbers Ignatz”
references an episode in Beroul’s Romance
of Tristan, and “Invisible Ignatz”
was inspired by the mad scene in Lucia di Lammermoor.
Other figures appear in cameo—Kim Philby, Peter
Pan, Michaux’s Plume, Ali Baba, Marcel from
Belle de Jour, Phineas Finn, Genji, Iceberg Slim,
Fraser’s Flashman—the list goes on.

JH: How did your study of law inform the multifaceted
examination and exposure of Ignatz?

MY: There’s
at least one process that constitutional law shares
with romantic obsession—the process of reification,
by which a beloved concept may find its individualized
meaning dissolving through its application to an infinity
of situations. Even as the Supreme Court this year made
a fetish of the First Amendment by holding that it protected
the freedom of “speech” of nonhuman corporations,
so the lover makes a fetish of her beloved, imagining
him in turn as lover, hero, villain, fugitive….
The beloved—law or lover—is emptied of meaning,
of uniqueness, a mere figurine set against a variety
of backdrops. Several perceptive critics noted the extreme
impersonality of Ignatz as love object in the book—this
is how obsession dissolves the features of its objects,
which, as Nietzsche puts it, become “coins which
have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal,
no longer as coins.”

In a more literal sense, my
extremely limited exposure to criminal law gave me the
experiences that turned into “Ignatz at the _____
Hotel” and “Ignatz Incarcerated”—the
former from my review of an interrogation transcript
in a death penalty appeal, and the second from a visit
to San Quentin to look into allegations of excessive
force in solitary confinement.

JH: Ignatz
sometimes seems to swell, embodying something beyond
the corporeal, more of an elusive cultural dream or
perhaps “hope” itself. Did you find yourself
returning to any particular watchwords or abstractions
like “hope” when writing the book?

MY: The
word that kept recurring was “helpless,”
which appears multiple times in the volume, and which,
oddly, was a word I associated far more with Ignatz
than with the supposed victim, Krazy. Despite all his
professions of disregard, each strip finds Ignatz searching
out Krazy, knowing that his arrival on the scene will
provoke the response that will justify the brickbat
rejoinder. Like any lab rat in a Skinner box, “The
Subject Ignatz” finds that the repetition is itself
the addiction, entirely apart from the supposed reward.
The glazed look common to a gambler pulling a slot machine
lever and to a mouse pushing a button with its bruised
nose is the same look of exhaustion worn by the lover
who finds obsession pulling him or her through the cycle
once again.

Jean Hartig
is the author of a poetry chapbook, Ave, Materia,
and the associate editor of Poets & Writers
Magazine.